I was the business analyst working on a debt management project. One of the deliverables was to develop standard letters to be sent to customers who were in arrears. These letters would differ based on the age of the arrears in terms of number of days. It ranged from 15 days, 30 days, 60 days and 90 days arrears.

It was time for me to look for “stakeholder” defined to be any person or organization that is actively involved in the project, or whose interests may be affected positively or negatively by execution of the project. As you know, stakeholders can be internal or external to the organization. I made a list which excluded the communication manager who had the power to determine the message and structure of the letters.

A Guide To The Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) Fourth Edition states, Work Breakdown Structure is”… a deliverable-oriented hierarchical decomposition of the work to be executed by the project team to accomplish the project objectives and create the required deliverables, with each descending level of the WBS representing an increasingly detailed definition of the project work.”

Imagine the WBS is a drilling tool used to get the project manager and the project team to the smallest part of the hierarchical work decomposition. It chips away at the summary information (the first tier of the WBS) to the detail data or tasks (the second tier of the WBS). This second tier is usually broken down into third and successive tiers depending on the size of the project.

WBS accesses information by starting with a general category (the deliverables) and move down through the hierarchy to get to the work packages. Read the Complete Article